economy

Category archives for economy

From London Banker: “The problem with financial institution balance sheets is that on the left hand side nothing is right and on the right hand side nothing is left.” It’s pretty obvious that financial institutions are struggling. We’ve had 16 banks taken over by the FDIC in the past two years, 13 so far this…

Large Wall Street independent investment banks had a nice thing going. Because much of what they did was not depository banking, there was little Federal oversight. Instead, the SEC let them run voluntary oversight programs. Now, the SEC chairman, Christopher Cox, has assessed the performance of their voluntary oversight program: The financial upheaval of the…

No, this is not a conspiracy hypothesis. There really is a shadow banking system. There is even a Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee (although the Committee is really a study group, not a regulatory body of any sort). The System is said to be falling apart. This might explain why the Fed and the Treasury…

The economic crisis is reported to be responsible for a recent increase in calls for mental health services: Economy worries driving more people to seek help By ROB WATERS and DAVID OLMOS September 20, 2008

Within the past few days, I’ve noticed quite a few bloggers and news writers make comparisons between the hurricanes and the financial meltdown. It just occurred to be that there is another facet to this analogy. This has to do with a very real problem that has been stirred up, literally.

There have already been several posts about hurricane Ike on Scienceblogs (1 2 3 4 5 6 7), but so far I haven’t seen anyone put the whole picture together. We still don’t know exactly where Ike will hit, but it looks increasingly likely that Ike will hit close to Houston. In fact, the most…

Toward the end of last week, the US stock market declined precipitously. Within the space of a few days, we learned that unemployment is way up, more than nine percent of U.S. mortgages were delinquent or in foreclosure, the FDIC closed the 11th bank so far this year (two were closed in 2007, none in…

Just in case you thought you were having a good day, here is a graph from the Fed that shows how much money the banks have: Don’t panic. The final number is from 1 July 2008. I’m sure they’ve fixed the problem by now. HT: London Banker, on Roubini’s Global EconoMonitor (RGE Monitor).